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Ben Rhodes

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Ben Rhodes

Former Deputy National Security Adviser

Ben Rhodes served as a deputy national security adviser and speechwriter for President Barack Obama. He is the author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore on May 3, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

America After 9/11

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Reaction to 9/11

So let's start where we're beginning the film, which is on 9/11, and the congressmen and -women come out on the steps and at some point start singing "God Bless America."Talk a little bit about where we were then, the America on that 9/11.

So my memory of that as a New Yorker, where this was a really traumatic experience, watching the towers fall and living in what felt like a war zone for, you know, a period of days, if not weeks, the smell, acrid, in the air.

I was 23 years old.I was a graduate student.I was a liberal, you know.But I don't remember that entering into any of my thought process.I remember wanting the president to succeed, wanting to see our representatives coming together, wanting to feel proud in seeing Republicans and Democrats singing "God Bless America," wanting the mayor of New York—Rudy Giuliani at the time—to be a hero.You know, at that time, there was a very real sense that there was a national identity that we all shared, that we all had to cling to together after this horrific thing that made no sense to us.

And, you know, I think to me, seeing members of Congress of both parties singing "God Bless America" together was a resonant moment that demonstrated, to a young person like me, that this is what we do, we come together.We don't pay any attention to political affiliation or disagreements on, what, tax policy, whatever the debates of the time were.And it made a difference; it made you feel like you could get through this because there was a broader whole that you were a part of.

The 9/11 Commission

I'm going to jump around and scoot through an awful lot.But just describe a little bit your two years of work on the 9/11 Commission.¹

U.S. Government: The Commission

What was your job?What did you do?What did you take away from that?

… So I was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades.And for me, it was an extraordinary opportunity because I got this kind of generalist immersion into the very multifaceted nature of the 9/11 Commission investigation.And you know, it was interesting, because I had kind of moved down to Washington pretty ready to join a relatively hawkish orientation of America after 9/11.I was fully on board with what we had done militarily in Afghanistan.I was skeptical but open to be persuaded on Iraq.And the Commission was the first time I started to question, well, maybe the story that I'd been told, by the president of the United States, in particular, isn't really the story that I'm seeing in the investigation that is underway.

And so to me, it was a complicated experience, because on the one hand, I wanted to continue this kind of bipartisan consensus around our national security and around what America should be doing in places like Afghanistan and then even Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11.And yet, you know, the inquiry itself raised a lot more questions in my mind about why we had done the things that we did after 9/11.

One of the other things you did was you were assigned to read all of bin Laden's fatwas.What was that like?What did you learn?

Well, I think what was so interesting to me about that is that I, as someone who was drawn to stories and drawn to words, had been very moved by [President George W.] Bush's speeches after 9/11, almost kind of roused by those speeches, in which he told a story.And the story was that Al Qaeda had done this because they hated our freedoms; they hated essentially kind of our identity as Americans, and that that was a galvanizing force, and that we were going to go abroad and defeat these people in the same way that we defeated the Nazis and the Communists before.It was all this kind of arc of American triumph that was now going to come to Al Qaeda.

And when I actually had to engage the words of bin Laden, the fatwas that he had written, and also look at the lives of the hijackers and what had motivated them—because this is something that [Vice Chair and former Rep. Lee] Hamilton (D-Ind.) was very interested in—those stories just did not match.I mean, if you take at face value why these people said they were doing what they were doing, it was entirely about our foreign policy and our support for the Saudi government, our support for the Egyptian government, our support for a brand of autocracy that had repressed people, that in no way at all, obviously, justified the evil they'd done, but it, you know, it forced me to confront the fact that this is a more complicated story than one I'd been told, and that this is not necessarily about them hating freedom; it's about them hating American policy.

And also, it forced me to kind of confront the reality that, if you looked at the story, the governments, if you wanted to point a finger at other governments, you would never point a finger at Iraq; they did not feature in the story at all.The Taliban wasn't even the primary government that I would look at.It was the Saudi government and the Pakistani government.… And it was really striking to me at the time, even as a pretty young newcomer to the field, why are we not talking about that?Why did we just spend the last two years talking about Iraq instead of examining our own relationships and history with the Saudi government and the Pakistani government?

Bush’s Reaction to 9/11

The things you said about the speeches is interesting to us.When [President] George [W.] Bush on that first night on 9/11 starts quoting the Bible and talking about, this is a fight between good and evil, does he understand who this enemy is?

I mean, looking back on this, I don't think George Bush had any idea who this enemy was.I don't think he'd done a lot of thinking about Al Qaeda, which, by the way, I don't hold against him as some gotcha; you know, we were all surprised by the scale of that attack.But I do think he clearly reflexively pivoted.

You know, as someone who became a speechwriter for a president, you realize that presidents have their own very particular view of America that is informed deeply by their own experience.Barack Obama's experience of America and what America means was very different than George Bush's.George Bush clearly believed deeply in an America that was right in some unquestionable way in its actions and an America that was deeply Christian in its orientation.And so when you have a moment of trauma like that, he clearly drew on that well of belief in what America was.

And it ended up framing this conflict that is incredibly complicated and has to do with deep currents of history in parts of the world that Americans don't really understand, a religion that Americans don't really understand.He framed it as, it's black and white; it's good and evil; it's freedom versus the opposite of freedom.And that was a very effective and powerful political device, but I actually think it set us on a course that was incredibly destructive and unnecessary.

The other thing that he said in his congressional speech, "We need to defeat all global terrorist groups." And in the book you sort of defined this as a recipe for a forever war.What do you remember about that speech and the consequences of it?

Well, again, as someone who's written thousands of presidential speeches, they're more important than you think.I mean, they really do set the outlines for what the U.S. government is going to do and how people in the United States think about success.You know, you define what success is to the American media, the American public, to American politics.And so when George W. Bush stands up and says, "We're going to defeat every terrorist group of global reach," well, that's the barometer for success.And when he says that we're going to essentially stamp out this ideology into the dustbin of history, along with communism and fascism, well, that's the definition of what we need to achieve, not: "We're going to go get the people who did this and make sure they don't do it again."That would have been a definable objective: We need to go get Al Qaeda; we need to go get bin Laden; and we've got to harden our defenses.

And I think Americans need to stop and reflect.Think of how different this would have been, you know, if we had just said, OK, Al Qaeda did this.We're going to get them, and we're going to take them out.And we're going to make clear to anybody else who would want to do this to us that if you do that, we're going to come get you, too.And meanwhile we're going to make it much harder for anybody to do this by hardening our defenses.You're talking about a relatively modest war and relatively modest amount of resources.The effort to defeat all terrorist groups of global reach, to essentially eradicate an ideology within Islam, a sprawling religion, that's a multitrillion-dollar enterprise that will never end, because there will always be people in some country somewhere who are terrorists or who subscribe to a particularly virulent form of Islam.

And so I think you can trace very much everything that's happened since to that speech to a joint session of Congress, where he essentially defined unachievable goals.

Guantanamo

What are the consequences of Guantanamo Bay?It seems to be the first test case for throwing out the rulebook on how we were going to fight this war.Looking back now on Guantanamo Bay, what were the consequences that they did not understand at the time?

So, I mean, I don't think Americans have the frame of reference to even get their minds around the extremity of Guantanamo Bay.It's become just kind of some other issue in our politics, issue in our culture war.This is like as extreme a thing as the United States government has done in the history of the United States, you know, to set up essentially a torture center—in a foreign country, by the way, Cuba, that I end up having a lot of experience with—that doesn't want us there already.We're already in a military base that is a symbol of American imperialism.And on that military base, we are going to set up a facility where we are going to torture people. …

It sent a message to the world that we were going to cast aside any rulebook, including the one that we had spent, you know, 60 years since World War II writing, to do whatever we wanted.And that, I think from the get-go, undermined support for what we were doing in the Muslim world, but it also, I think, to the rest of the world, made the war on terror something that was threatening, something that was undermining of essentially the international order we had built, rather than something that was meant to fortify and defend that international order.

And the imagery of it, the orange jumpsuits and the cages, what did the world see?And how did that damage American values?

I think that, you know, to Americans, it was like: "Don't you understand?We've just been through 9/11, and we have to do whatever we can to defend this country.And if somebody has information about a terrorist plot and the clock is ticking, of course you would torture them to get that information."That may have been the view in large parts of America.

To the rest of the world, the people in orange jumpsuits, you know, who were clearly being tortured I think were a symbol that the most powerful force in the world, the United States government, was willing to use the full extent of that power to just brutalize people, including innocent people.And I think it permanently damaged our capacity to speak about things like human rights, to speak about things like democracy and the rule of law, because what is more undemocratic, what is more illiberal than using the might of the strongest army in the history of the world to essentially completely subjugate individuals, some of whom were innocent?And this was apparent to the rest of the world very quickly, you know.

So even in those years of 2002, 2003, where the politics of terrorism in this country were focused on "Do whatever you can to stop the next attack," that was not the view around the world.And so from the very beginning, we began to lose the confidence, I think, of the world, not just in prosecuting the war on terror but as a world leader.You know, the combination of Guantanamo and Iraq, so outside the boundaries of any understood norm of how our nation conducts itself, even in war, you know, I think from the very beginning, that polluted the entire effort.

Failure to Capture bin Laden

Tora Bora, the consequences of not getting bin Laden then, the fact that he goes, escapes to Pakistan, continues to write fatwas, continues to run Al Qaeda, looking back at Tora Bora—and pursuing a plan, by the way, a plan that he seems to have that maybe the United States have not planned out as well, what are the consequences of Tora Bora and not getting him?

I think the consequences of Tora Bora were devastating for a couple reasons.First, because bin Laden really was the leader of Al Qaeda.And this we learned even more than we thought after we took out bin Laden and went into his compound.He was running that organization.But I think even more so symbolically, the failure to get him, it sent a message to the rest of the world, to the rest of the jihadist world at least, that, well, maybe we can evade these guys; maybe they're not as strong as we thought they were. …

And the importance of that fatwa he wrote in 2004, which said the intention was "death by a thousand cuts": When you read that, what sort of stands out for you?

Well, I think that he understood, clearly, and wrote about it and talked about the logic of the goal was getting America to overreact.I mean, that was the objective of what he was trying to do.And if I imagine bin Laden writing those words, I don't even know that in his own wildest dreams he would have imagined that we'd, you know, invade Iraq and occupy an Arab country, which is exactly what he would want, because it was both getting America to overreact and turning America into what he wanted it to be.You know, he wanted America to be cast as an occupying colonial power that violates human rights, that is hypocritical.And he essentially wanted to turn America into the worst version of what he believed it to be, you know.

And again, while I obviously don't believe that that's what America is, you know, clearly we walked into something of a trap in our post-9/11 overreach.

Invading Iraq

One other speech that we haven't talked about is [President Bush's] "axis of evil" speech, so the expansion of the war and the wording of that speech.When you listen to that speech, what are the consequences of that?What are the risks being set up on that very powerful speech?

Once again, the very effectiveness of that speech and the power of that speech is exactly why it was so catastrophically damaging to our efforts, because the first thing it did is it expanded who the enemy was beyond just Al Qaeda, this relatively small group of people, to suddenly include nation-states like Iran and North Korea.I think more broadly, though, the message it conveyed to the world is, maybe this isn't just about terrorism; maybe this is about essentially a whole bunch of American interests being folded into this effort, right?

So suddenly the Americans are saying that Iran and North Korea are somehow connected to this post-9/11 war that they're in, when Iran and North Korea had nothing to do with this. …

The consequences of the fact that the Congress, Democratic and Republican, even Biden and Hillary Clinton, supported the invasion of Iraq, what's the eventual blowback on that, and why?

I think the catastrophe of the Iraq War, it's almost incalculable to think it through because there's so many dimensions to it.It took our eye off Al Qaeda and made it much, much harder to defeat that group of terrorists.It really not only mired us in a multitrillion-dollar enterprise that broke Iraq, that set off chain reactions across the Middle East, that obviously cost thousands of American lives, but it also kind of fundamentally eroded international legitimacy of American leadership, you know, that all the things that we talked [about], an international system in which people play by rules, it made a mockery of that.

And beyond just that, it was so stupid that I think it undermined the confidence that people had that Americans might know what they were doing.Why would you do something so unfathomably stupid as invade the wrong country and occupy that country and invite, like, a multidecade insurgency?It, to this day, you know, you meet foreigners, they can't understand why this happened.

And to me, what's so damaging about it, you know, something that doesn't get enough attention I think in these debates is the way that the politics of that happened, you know, that people, people who knew better, voted for it because they were afraid of being called weak, you know.That psychology is responsible for so much that has gone wrong in this country since 9/11, the weaponization of the politics of national security, so that you have Democratic as well as Republican members of Congress voting for a war that—does anybody really believe that if they were president they would have chosen to do that?But they were so afraid of, you know, some ad that would be run against them.

And this is why Guantanamo never got closed.This is why, you know, we're still fighting wars 20 years later, just because of the depths of the fear that political leaders experienced about the blowback, you know.That undermined, I think, confidence in the American public in their leaders.You know, if people weren't willing to say what they really thought, you know, who can I trust anymore?The Democrats voted for this war, too; how can I—why should I trust them any more than I trust the Republicans, you know?

And then, because when it went wrong relatively quickly, one of the reasons why there wasn't more I think of a blowback in terms of—I mean, you would think something that terrible happened, you would think it would kind of permanently discredit a political party like the Republican Party that was in power, or the people who were responsible for it.One of the reasons why it didn't is because so many other people had voted for it.

So when you had, again, people who I agree with and in many ways admire, like John Kerry or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton then criticizing the war, they didn't have anywhere near the—the legitimacy as someone who'd actually opposed the war.And, you know, we have to wrestle that as a country here, that you can't just say George Bush did this.We all did this.You know, this was a pretty overwhelming vote.I often like to point out that it was much, much harder to just get an Iran nuclear deal from being killed by Congress than it was to get a vote to invade and occupy Iraq.What does that say about the politics of national security in this country?Nothing good.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

… So when weapons of mass destruction are basically knocked down and people understand that it ain't going to happen, they're not going to find anything, you write that the rationale for war melts away, and it turns into a reason now to spread democratic values. That becomes the reason.What are the consequences of that turn?And what is your overview of how neatly that reason for being there changed?

If you look at Bush's speech when we literally went to war, it's all about weapons of mass destruction and the kind of gathering danger that must be confronted, and maybe at the end, on the way out of the speech, he'll talk about democratic values.

But what happened is, when the rationale for war collapsed and there were no weapons of mass destruction and there was not a tie with Al Qaeda, you saw the Bush administration in 2004 begin to pivot very aggressively to promoting the war as an effort to extend democratic values as a fight for freedom, to the point that by the time we get to Bush's second inaugural, that speech is entirely about freedom and defending freedom around the world.And you would have thought, watching that speech, that the whole reason we'd gone into war in Iraq was because we had this kind of missionary impulse to spread freedom and democracy.

Paradoxically, as much as I myself wished that freedom and democracy were the norm around the world, that did grave damage to freedom and democracy, because it associated democracy with an incredibly undemocratic thing, which was the invasion and occupation of another country, the denial of self-determination, in many ways, of the United States going in and deciding, over world opinion, that they're just going to do this.

And I think if you look at what's happened since, I mean, the trend lines against democracy are pretty clear, that in the last 15 years, there's been this rapid diminution of democratic government around the world, and there's been this growth in nationalist, autocratic governance all over the world, on every continent.It begins right around then.

Us Versus Them

… You talked a little bit about this already, but let me ask you in another way.The post-invasion, you write that "hubris, brutality, ignorance" is what was shown and that we were "woefully incompetent as an occupier."So what's the impact domestically?How does this help to feed division in America?How does it change politics?

So I think at the beginning, it changed politics simply because there was this deliberate decision made by the Republican Party to utilize and weaponize the war on terror in American politics.And I think the 2002 midterm election was an incredibly consequential event in our history, because the Democrats lost because they were perceived as weak, and the Republicans won because they were perceived as strong.And almost every national security debate since that election has been fought on the same basic battlefield, no matter what's happened.

But I think more insidiously, underneath that, I think that the effect of those post-9/11 years led to the kind of radical, xenophobic nationalism that we see, because essentially what you had is Bush set up this idea, "It's Us versus Them."I mean, it's literally what he said: "It's Us versus Them."In his mind, the "Them" at the time was, you know, Al Qaeda, radical Islam, whatever you want to call it.But he had created an Other, you know, and when you create an Other, that is easily portable.

And so over the years, what's happened is all that animus that was stirred up among a lot of the American population, particularly more conservative elements of the American population, have found that, you know, it started with Muslims, but that could become directed at immigrants on our southern border, at a Black president, at any number of Others that could be manufactured over the years.

And part of what happened is, if you were consuming right-wing media in the Bush years, you were constantly being told that we're on the doorstep of a great victory.I mean, that was the narrative at all times.You know, even after things had gone wrong, the surge was going to finally deliver the victory.And so you're just riding this narrative of, there are dangerous enemies out there who are not like us, who are different, and they want to destroy our way of life.But George Bush, the Republican Party is about to deliver a victory that is on par with the victories we won in World War II and the Cold War.

By the time you get to Obama's election, well, it's clear, first of all, that those victories are not coming.And now the president is Black, and he's a liberal, and he opposed these wars.And I think what I felt very acutely in the Obama years is a lot of that nationalism and xenophobia that was stirred up in those Bush years, because it wasn't going to get expression in some victory in Afghanistan or Iraq, it suddenly began to be repurposed to "We oppose Obama; we need to take our country back; we oppose immigrants; we oppose anybody who can be cast as the American Other."

And this is not unusual.If you look at history, when you don't win wars, when you arguably lose wars, you go in search of the enemy within, who you can blame for the fact that you didn't win those wars.

And so these conspiracy theories about people wanting to spread Shariah law in the United States, you know, people who want to let terrorists come across our borders, that's very in line.It's not new.It's the oldest playbook that there is, which is, you couldn't win the war because you probably never should have fought the war in the first place, and you don't want to get responsibility for that, so you want to deflect the anger to Others.

And I think that has poisoned the well of American politics in ways that we truly fail to recognize, because we don't want to connect those dots, because it's very difficult and painful to connect those dots, to realize that what started with a bunch of members of Congress singing "God Bless America" on the steps of the Capitol has somehow turned into QAnon 20 years later.And I think there's a very direct line, because I think when you have people who can't trust elites anymore, who can't trust institutions anymore, who are angry that the wars that they were promised great victories in didn't turn out well, they start to look for people to blame.They start to look for explanations for something that makes no sense.And that is very fertile ground for racism, bigotry and ultimately conspiracy theories.

Abu Ghraib

The next thing is Abu Ghraib.So those pictures come out of Abu Ghraib.Domestically, again, what's the fallout?What does Obama think, if you know?Abu Ghraib—how much of a turning point was Abu Ghraib in the United States, and why?

I think Abu Ghraib was the time when Americans finally saw more clearly what the rest of the world had kind of already calculated.So if Guantanamo was something of the moment where the rest of the world was like, "This is totally out of control," it was somewhat sanitized to the American eye.It was people in orange jumpsuits, or it was kind of secondhand reporting, investigative journalism.Suddenly in Abu Ghraib, we could not turn our eyes away from the reality of what we were doing to people, you know, and the stark horror of those images—you know, someone on a box with a hood over his head, you know.The clear effort to humiliate and subjugate and torture could no longer be denied.

What's interesting to me is that it was after Abu Ghraib that you got more of a groundswell to ban torture, when in fact the torture regime had been set up, you know, in a very clinical way to deal with Al Qaeda and Guantanamo and other black sites around the world.So to me, you know, Abu Ghraib was the moment when the curtain kind of fell on America, and enough Americans saw, again, what the world saw, which is that this has gone completely wrong, like this has brought out the darkest aspect of America, not the better aspect of America.And we had gone to war thinking of our better selves, thinking of the country that liberated Europe in World War II, you know, the country that faced down communism in the Cold War.

And now we were a country that was occupying Iraq and torturing its people in kind of grotesque, almost casual ways that could not be explained with some justification that, well, they know the terrorist plot and the clock is ticking, so if you have to waterboard someone to find out, you know—I think there was a cinematic image that Americans had of torture, of some guy who knows that a bomb's going to go off in Times Square, so you might need to rough him up.You know, Abu Ghraib was not that.These were rank-and-file insurgents, you know—if they were insurgents, frankly—just being tortured by young American kids because they had impunity, you know?And that, I think, did change the attitudes among a segment of the American public.

How did Obama talk about that as an important moment to understand?

I think that, you know, in talking to Obama about this over the years, the tragedies—I think he saw something like Abu Ghraib as something that happens when you go to war, that you can't control all the consequences.And when you go to war and you don't put in place kind of rigorous safeguards around the rule of law and how you're dealing with detainees and how you're targeting enemies on the battlefield, you get civilian casualties, you get torture.

And, you know, I think for him, it added to a sense that there was not just a strategic error in Iraq; there was a moral failing of the country.And when you look at someone like Barack Obama deciding that he's going to do something as audacious as run for president at his relatively young age—he was my age as I'm now, almost—you know, you only can make that decision if you really think that the people who are older and more experienced just, they can't do this, or they can't be trusted to do this.

And so I think that the absolute failure, not just strategically but morally, that you see in a thing like Abu Ghraib is part of what, I think, leads a young Barack Obama to think, you know, "I should just take these people on because they definitely don't know better."

The Election of Obama

… Besides making him run, how does the events, the decisions made by President Bush affect and shape the way that President Obama views the responsibilities that he takes on?

Well, first of all, there's a zero percent chance that Barack Obama ever becomes president of the United States without the Iraq War.I mean, zero, you know.Maybe when he's older, I guess.But like, he got elected to the Senate in large part because he had been right about the Iraq War before it.He ran in 2008, and the only reason he had a shot at defeating Hillary Clinton is because he'd opposed the war, and she'd supported it.So in this very kind of curious accident of history, the Iraq War opens the door to the first Black president and to Barack Obama himself.

I think in terms of his presidency itself, it set up the dynamic that shaped the Obama presidency, where he was going to be incredibly cautious about getting us into another Iraq, and incredibly disciplined in trying to kind of put some guardrails and some reins on how America conducts itself in the Middle East, even as he has to be commander in chief of a country that is in the middle of these wars.So you can't just pull up stakes and go home.

And so it set up this incredibly palpable tension that was there all eight years, where you have to execute these wars that you would not have started.And yet you're doing everything you can to avoid repeating the mistakes that you see the previous administration made.

One other thing on that.We're into Obama now, but the effect, during the campaign, when Obama talked about this in front of people at rallies, what was the effect on people towards what he was saying, when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan?

I think people forget—because why would they remember?—how much Iraq was absolutely central to that Democratic primary.And I was both the speechwriter and foreign policy adviser, and he basically created an argument that was about Iraq, but it was about politics in general.

He created an argument where he essentially said, "How can you trust these people after they got it so wrong?"And I remember there was an interesting moment, ironically, when he said he'd go into Pakistan to get bin Laden, and somehow they all decided to criticize that, so Biden, Hillary, everybody kind of pounced on this.

And there was a debate in which they were all kind of landing their punches on him: He's naive; he's irresponsible; he doesn't understand how foreign policy works; he's not ready to be commander in chief.And he just says, "I'm not going to be lectured about foreign policy from the people responsible for the most catastrophic foreign policy decision in my life."Game over, you know.Audience explodes, like.That happened time and again.It totally mitigated whatever advantage of experience or age that his opponents had.

I think more fundamentally, though, the argument he mounted against Hillary Clinton that's interesting to look at in retrospect was not just about the war and her vote for war; it was about a sense that politicians were not being honest about this throughout, because she was saying as late as 2007, she had actually voted for diplomacy, not war.And that was actually as devastating to her as the vote for war, because Obama could just say: "Look, these people aren't telling the truth.Does anybody think that was a vote for diplomacy at the time?"

And I remember writing speeches.The next day, the headline of <i>The New York Times</i> didn't say, "Congress votes for diplomacy"; it said, "Congress votes for war."And the audience would kind of explode in cheers but also laughter.And he was tapping into the sense of, like, these people not only got this wrong, but they won't even tell us the truth about it; they won't even be straight with us about it now, five years later, when it's so clear to see, you know.

And I think that gave Obama, you know, the connection with the audience of authenticity.It's not just that this guy was right about Iraq; it's he's actually willing to tell us what's happening and what happened, that we saw with our own eyes.You know, sometimes politicians are so focused on talking their way through something that they forget that everybody saw that.

So I could see the meeting where it seemed like a good answer to say, "Well, actually we were voting for diplomacy, not war."But that makes sense in a meeting of political consultants; it doesn't make sense in a living room in Iowa, you know?And so I think what Obama tapped into was not just anger at the Iraq War but the anger at how fake everything felt about it, from the news media to how politicians justified their actions to just the failure to properly account with this horrible thing that had happened that was leading Americans to die and leading us to spend all this money in Iraq.

The thing we want to talk about is the Nobel Peace Prize, because the reality about that speech is it's fascinating because it really does set—when you read the speech, you see that he's setting up what his doctrine will be, about what a just war is and such.But before we do that, were you on the plane helping write that speech as you guys went across?

Yeah.

So, talk a little bit about what that was like.

Well, what was so interesting about that is that Obama had not focused at all on that speech, because a week before, he had to give this speech in West Point announcing the surge to Afghanistan.And so he'd been consumed by the review of the war in Afghanistan and then the speech that I had to write for him where he announced that we're going to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.And so then we kind of pivot from this speech sending young people to war to this speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

And we had written a draft for him that focused on the tension of him getting the award at the beginning of his presidency.And literally the morning that he was supposed to leave for Oslo, he calls me and Jon Favreau, the other speechwriter, in and says, "Guys, the interesting tension here is that I'm commander in chief of a country that's at war, that just sent 30,000 people to escalate a war, and I'm getting a peace prize."And he had stayed up most of the night before writing out his own draft dealing with that tension and turning it into this question of, what is a just war, and when do you go to war, and when do you not?And if you don't go to war, what other tools are available to you?

And he had situated it in the broadest kind of human context possible.It started with like the first man and the origins of war and came all the way up to today.And we're flying on Air Force One, staying up the whole night, knowing that we're going to have to land, and he's going to have to go right to give this speech.And literally he's making revisions, passing them to me page by page.I'm putting them in a computer, printing it out, giving it to him.And finally, I'm like: "Go to sleep.You need to sleep an hour before you deliver this speech."

But it made it this kind of very raw, kind of personal effort of his to work through what had been going through his mind about what it meant to be president, about what it meant to be commander in chief, about how to approach decisions about when to go to war and when not to.And I think that did come out in the speech.

Obama’s View on Afghanistan

So Afghanistan, how does he view Afghanistan?He called it, of course, the "good war," and Iraq was the "bad war."How he viewed it, and what were his initial hopes?

I'd say, well, he believed it was a necessary war, right, whereas the Iraq War was unnecessary.And when we came into office, a couple things were happening.Al Qaeda had very much reconstituted itself in Pakistan, basically, and there were terrorist plots, and very acute, potentially catastrophic terrorist plots.Nothing on the order of 9/11, but if you remember, efforts to, you know, detonate a car bomb in Times Square or efforts to blow up airplanes, so we had a terrorist threat that was real and that you could see in your morning intelligence reports.And then you had a circumstance in Afghanistan where, you know, the Taliban had really seized the initiative and was kind of incrementally tilting the balance of that war in their favor.

And so Obama gets a bunch of requests for more troops in Afghanistan.One that had been on the shelf, you know, under Bush for a few months, it was just about, like, emergency; get these troops in there so the Afghans can have an election so that, you know, the place doesn't fall apart.And so he approves that one relatively quickly.

But then he gets a much bigger request from Gen. [Stanley] McChrystal, when he becomes commander in Afghanistan.And Obama's like: "This doesn't feel right.Let's stop.I need to step back and consider what are we trying to achieve in Afghanistan?What are these troops going to do?What broader strategy are they a part of?Essentially, what are we trying to accomplish, and therefore what are the resources that we need to accomplish that?"

In the process of that review, what became very clear to me in talking to Obama is the way he looked at Afghanistan is: We're not going to fix this place, you know; we're not going to achieve the most aspirational kind of think-tank paper about assembling a counterinsurgency strategy and a development strategy and this strategy and have Afghanistan essentially become this self-sustaining, well-governed country anytime soon, but that there was a very real terrorism threat, largely in Pakistan, but that it was symbiotic, to some extent, with the conflict in Afghanistan, and that if we didn't kind of push back the Taliban, create some space for our counterterrorism efforts to continue and accelerate in Pakistan and to give the Afghan government kind of this chance to be the force who could fight the Taliban, that the whole thing could just implode, and then we'd have a terrorism problem and an Afghanistan problem all together.

So he was persuaded that there was reason enough to send additional troops.I think in retrospect I'm not sure we needed to.But he never bought onto [Gen. David] Petraeus and McChrystal's belief that there was a kind of counterinsurgency strategy that we perfected in Iraq that could somehow be portable to Afghanistan.And that created this tension between him and the military that continued for a period of years.

You write that these forces—your word—kept pulling him deeper into this quagmire, deeper into Afghanistan war despite initial hopes to end it.What was that reality?

Well, I'd say the quagmire was kind of even bigger than Afghanistan, but on Afghanistan in particular, McChrystal and Petraeus had basically bought into this idea of counterinsurgency, which now we don't talk about much, but was very trendy in 2008/2009; that they'd figured out in Iraq this concept that if you protect the population, and you kind of restore governance in certain areas, that you can build from that foundation and defeat these insurgencies.

I remember that after Obama sent those additional troops, McChrystal basically set about pursuing the counterinsurgency model in southern Afghanistan.And there was this huge battle in a place called Marjah, a relatively small Afghan city, where it did not go easily, and it did not comport with the version that had been discussed in the Situation Room about how we would go in and this would work and we'd create governance.

And by the time that he had to do his next review, Petraeus was the commander and basically wanted to keep moving this counterinsurgency strategy up and around the country, and Obama said, "I'm just not going to do it.And we're going to start withdrawing troops."And this was June 2011. …

So you write about, in 2011 and 2012, there were meetings at the White House to try to figure out how to disentangle from the post-9/11 wars.Talk a little bit about those meetings, and just describe what the overall goals were.

So, you know, in 2011, I think there was a unique set of circumstances that aligned, where there was at least a chance to try to begin to put an end to this 9/11 era.Bin Laden was killed, and so we had the biggest victory that America was ever going to get in the post-9/11 wars.But also, you had the beginning of the drawdown in Afghanistan, which was in June of 2011.

And so, coincidentally, by the way, bin Laden is killed around May 1; the drawdown begins in June. There's this sense of: "Wait a second. How can we begin to tell a story about how these wars are going to end?," recognizing that this is going to take a long time, that this is going to extend probably even beyond the Obama presidency.But just directionally, if so much of the American endeavor in the post-9/11 wars had been escalation in the first decade, I think Obama just wanted to turn the ocean liner of American national security and point it in the direction of winding down the wars.

And so we recognized, though, as we began our meetings on this, how complicated this was, because there's the question of, how do you with Iraq and the American forces leaving there?And what's the nature of our relationship with Iraq?There's the question of Afghanistan and what's the pace at which you can draw down in Afghanistan.

There's the question, though, of this massive architecture, of drones and counterterrorism operations that we built across many countries, and what do you need to leave in place, and what do you then need to try to transition to local partners who can take this on for you?Then there's the question of just the legal framework around the war itself: What are the authorities under which you're fighting the war, never mind things like, can you close the prison in Guantanamo Bay?

So when you stacked up the amount of work that had to be done to untangle this, you got an appreciation for how difficult it was.

I think what was interesting to me at the time is Obama began to, in his speeches, talk about this.And he would just say things like: "The tide of war is receding.The number of U.S. troops is finally coming down, not just in Iraq but in Afghanistan, too."And what really struck me at that time was there was a ferocious backlash to that, you know.What is he talking about?He's not committed to the mission in Afghanistan.You know, he—there was—it was if the idea of ending these wars was the worst possible thing a president could do to Lindsey Graham, you know, people like that, right, but people who had a giant megaphone in Washington.

And I think there was a sense among Democrats—not all Democrats, but some Democrats said: "It's not worth the fight on national security.Just do what's necessary to look tough and strong so that we can have a domestic agenda."This has been a psychology I think among some Democrats, which made it hard to get Democratic support for even simple things, like a vote to be able to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, you know.

And so, you know, looking back, I'm just struck by how much the antibodies of the American political and national security state kind of arrayed to prevent any president from really ending these wars.And we're here 20 years later, and it's still just as strong.

So the nature of politics is part of the reason that we're still in the wars?

People talk about, look—and [President Donald] Trump talked about deep states.It's politics much more than that.

The political incentives are such that the risks associated with ending wars are seen as far greater than the risks associated with kind of being in them.And what was interesting is that Americans clearly didn't want another Iraq, right, so starting a new war, that became a lot harder, right?So the idea of going to war in Syria, for instance, right, would become a lot harder.But pulling up stakes and kind of not having drone strikes and not having troops in all these places?You know, I think there was this calculation that, well, what happens if there's a terrorist attack, you know?That would be the end of a presidency. …

Obama’s Use of Drones

So let's talk about drones.You mentioned it a couple times.Why does Obama embrace this strategy?I mean, certainly it had started under Bush, but Obama administration embraces it much more and uses it much more and much more pointedly, as well as using JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] forces and stuff.What was the idea?

Well, I think there was a convergence of two things.There was a convergence of the development of certain capabilities in the United States government and what Obama wanted to do.So what Obama wanted to do is bring our troops home and disentangle ourselves from these wars and not get into new wars, if he could help it.And at the same time, Obama believed there was a terrorist threat.I mean, I'm obviously very critical of a lot of our post-9/11 response, but there are terrorists out there who, left totally unmolested, would try to come to America and blow things up.So how do you deal with that?

Well, one of the things that had happened in the years leading into the Obama presidency is, at the same time that we were mired in these occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan that weren't going well, we were developing this new technology of unmanned drones, that with great precision could kind of pick out a target and take it out.

We developed an intelligence network that had kind of gotten much better at mapping out who the terrorists were and where they were.And we developed, in part in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this extraordinary special forces capability where the capacity to pick out a house in a neighborhood in Mosul or Kandahar and show up in the middle of the night and kick down a door and pull out a terrorist leader had really advanced leaps and bounds beyond where it was at the beginning of 9/11.

So here you have a president who wants to reduce America's military footprint, and you have these new ways at taking out terror safe havens that seemed to work and that don't involve sending thousands of troops into places.And I think that created a very powerful momentum to turn in 2009, '10 and '11 to this mix of drones and special forces to take out in a very precise way terrorist and terrorist safe havens without the kind of open-ended application of U.S. troops that you had in Iraq and Afghanistan.I know it's—I'm describing why it's happened, not that it happened perfectly.But that—I think that's what describes it.

Last thing on drones is connected to this, the idea that you write about the fact that the fear you had about it was it was dehumanizing, and you tell the story about a general and squirters, calling people who are escaping.Talk about that and the lesson that should be learned from that story.

You know, it's interesting.I remember early on there was an action we were taking in Yemen where there was some capacity to monitor it by video.

There's an explosion at an alleged terrorist site, and then there were people that were not killed in this explosion.And so the way that manifests itself on a video is kind of small dots essentially fleeing the scene.And what I heard and learned is that the term for that is "squirters," because it looked like literally people squirting out from the site of the explosion.

And it stuck in my head at the time, and I just thought, like, what happens when a superpower spends trillions of dollars over a long period of time figuring out different ways to kill people?You know, think of how many ways the United States has killed people since 9/11.You get squirters, like an utterly dehumanizing concept, like it's a splatter on a paint canvas, not like a human being with family.

And I want to be very clear.I don't hold that against the general or the—they were told to do this; they were told to kill these people.That's us who did that, not the general.In some ways, the military is much closer to understanding the reality of this, but the extent to which human life is kind of debased and devalued through that.

And I'll say, you know, I felt it.The day I walked out of government, I felt much more comfortable with drones than I do now because it just felt like, of course, we're doing this.There's a terrorist threat, and we need to take care of the terrorist threat.If we don't, it could be terrible in terms of loss of life.It could end the presidency politically if it looks like you gave up this fight and then there's a terrorist attack.So the logic of what you're doing is very clear.

And the more time went on, you know—and I would even say, I'm comfortable defending this, which I had to do publicly a lot, because I think that these people are dangerous, and if we're not taking them out with a drone, it would be a less precise weapon, like a cruise missile or an airstrike.

But the more I got away from this, just kind of considered the apparatus that I was a part of, and particularly talking to people, you know—I've made a point of trying to meet people from Afghanistan and Pakistan and other places, you know, where they describe the buzz overhead and this feeling of dread, of just living in a kind of permanent surveillance of an American killing machine, people who are not terrorists, just people.I was like, I wish more people who worked in these positions wrestled with that.

… On Iraq—this is the "bad war"—how did the legacy of George Bush bring Obama to this moment where he basically says: "OK, here's what we're doing.Let's tell the truth here.We've got to get out"?

I think the legacy of Bush—I mean, apart from being there in the first place—was, again, the expectation that had been created around the language of democracy, around the triumphalism of the surge, which doesn't get as much attention, but you would have thought that that was D-Day, and we were going to win on the back end of it, you know, whereas, you know, we reduced violence, but Iraq is still Iraq on the back end of it, and it's still a badly fractured sectarian country.

You've got a much bigger national security threat next door in Iran.Because of the war in Iraq, they've been incredibly strengthened and emboldened.You find yourself in this kind of maddening situation where the same people who were the biggest advocates of the war in Iraq are the biggest hawks on Iran, and you're just trying to get out of this place and move on.But you—you're carrying the burden of not achieving the things that Bush set out to achieve, right?There's no democracy, not really.I mean, there's kind of a partial democracy, but it's kind of a machine patronage-type democracy.You've got to deal with the Iranians, and you're getting criticized on the way out by the hawks for leaving.Never mind that you're leaving under the agreement that George Bush negotiated.I mean, the whole thing was, you know, incredibly challenging. …

Underestimating ISIS

… Of course we go back when ISIS rises up.The underplaying of ISIS that Obama does, the "JV" quote, which I'm sure was one quote, if he could take back, he probably would take back.What was the misunderstanding as ISIS was growing in strength?

When I look back at that whole period, the failure was more tilted in the direction of the Iraqi security forces and our assessment of them than ISIS, in the sense that to the intelligence community's credit, they were warning about ISIS.They were like, these guys who used to be Al Qaeda in Iraq, they moved into eastern Syria, they're an increasing player there.They were—they were sounding those alarm bells.The idea that they could kind of march into Iraq and begin to conquer the Iraqi security forces, people did not foresee that, and part of that's because we'd invested so much money and armed the Iraqi security forces that we thought they could handle that.And I think the U.S. military was invested in their capability.

And so the failure of imagination, policy, intelligence, what have you, on everybody was when they kind of overran like Mosul.It was like, wait, these guys can—these guys can defeat vastly larger, better-armed security forces.That to me was—that was the: "Well, we're going to have to go back, because the Iraqis can't handle this."If they'd just stayed in Syria, I don't know that, you know, it would have been the same.

And the thinking of Obama at that point of having to go back, and also you've got the nightmares of the heads being lopped in off in videos that are being played, and ISIS is, no doubt about it, is becoming much stronger and stronger.The decision, was it a hard decision to make to go back?What was the view?

It was a very hard decision for him.

I think he knew the psychological impact of a return to Iraq, even in incredibly different circumstances.I mean, again, I just think there's—there was almost this kind of gleeful spiking of the football from hawks, you know: "Oh, see, you're back.""Well, we're back in a pretty different way here.We're not invading this country; we're sending, you know, a pretty small contingent of U.S. troops, and we're engaged in airpower.""But you're back.You're back in a war in Iraq."And it means that the clock on this whole enterprise of fighting terrorism is going to be extended.

That weighed on him. …

Legacy of the Obama Years

So just talk to me about—sum it up—the legacy for Obama's years and dealing with the wars.You've already talked about this, but I guess the inability to move away from the 9/11 era completely because of what?What's the legacy?

Well, I think the legacy is that Obama did arrest the escalation of those wars, reversed the escalation of those wars, and began to introduce the elements of post-post-9/11 American foreign policy.And look, there are things.We could have gone into Pakistan.We could have poured more troops into Afghanistan.We could have gone to war with Iran.We could have gone to war and removed [Syria's Bashar al-]Assad.There are so many things that would have been the pretty logical next step of where momentum was going at any given time.

One thing presidents tend to not get credit for are the mistakes that they don't make.You know, Obama famously said, like, "Don't do stupid stuff."There was plenty of stupid stuff that I think, you know, he could have done if he had just taken the recommendations, the logical momentum of the recommendations he was being given.That's the first thing.

I think he did fundamentally kind of point the enterprise in a new direction, but he didn't end it.You know, he didn't dismantle this infrastructure of 9/11.And I think, again, part of that is—I mean, there's a lot of reasons for it.I mean, part of it is, you know, he's a deliberate person who moved incrementally.

Part of that is the fact that the politics of this country and the politics of terrorism really rendered that impossible.I mean, you can say it sounds like an excuse.In 2009—because I do think sometimes you can best answer a question through a kind of an example—at the height of his popularity, I mean, he's polling at 65%, we've got a financial crisis.He's just been elected on a platform of ending these wars.He wanted to close Gitmo.

And part of the plan involved, like, a very small number of Uyghurs who were guilty of nothing being released in the United States.And the entire Congress had a complete meltdown, including Democrats.And that was the impetus for them to eventually pass laws with Democratic votes saying, "You can't do this."That was like about a few people.

I mean, my point is that you're president; yes, you set the agenda.Like, Obama didn't have the support of the American political apparatus, the American media infrastructure, just wasn't in any way conditioned to accept that we were just going to end—pull up stakes and leave places like Afghanistan, never mind Iraq, or that we're going to stop taking drone strikes, or that somehow we're going to close Gitmo over the objections of Congress.

So, you know, every presidency is a kind of a negotiation between what a president wants to do, what his party wants to do, Congress and the executive branch, political maneuvering room.I think in the end, Obama got a slow start to winding down 9/11 because he came in with a more hawkish team, came in focused on the financial crisis.He began to wrap his arms around this around 2011.And I think if you look at the arc of the presidency from 2011 to the end, like it is a story of trying to get out.

But—even if he had done everything he could, I don't think there was ever a scenario where you really end it.It was too big.I mean, we'd set something in motion after 9/11 that was far too vast for any one president to end.And that's why we're sitting here, 20 years later, with that entire infrastructure still in place, expect for largely Iraq.

The Trump Years

So Donald Trump, so 2016, he uses the distrust of government, the incompetence of government, the wars, the lies, the whatever from the early days as a weapon to get elected.What is he doing politically as a political animal that he is and the consequences of it?

I think if you look at the arc of the story from 9/11 to Donald Trump, you know, what Donald Trump recognized is that everybody in this country had some reason to basically lose complete confidence in the U.S. government during that period of time, because of the incredible stupidity of the Iraq War; because of the dishonesty and duplicity that seemed to be normalized by the fact that things as consequential as a war could be kind of lied about regularly and repeatedly; because of the failure of the kind of media to be able to manage dishonesty on that scale; because of the financial crisis and the sense of people's kind of dislocation, that the whole enterprise isn't really working for me anymore.

But I think more acutely than that, what he understood is that 9/11 had ceased to be about foreign policy.It was the Other; it was about the fact that there was an Us versus a Them, and that the same emotion that Bush effectively tapped into in 2002 and his 2004 reelection campaigns, where it was focused on, "We've got to fight the terrorists," could be easily repurposed against any Other: Obama as the Black president, not born in America, he's not from here, he's not one of us, maybe he's a Muslim; the terrorists coming across the southern border, they're not sending their best, they're rapists, they're killers.

All this rhetoric, it's the same rhetoric as post-9/11 America.It's the same enemy that so many Americans in Trump's base had consumed night after night after night on Fox News.It's just, instead of it being Al Qaeda, it's immigrants or refugees or Black people or anything, trans people, you know, as long as it's an Other, you know.

And so I think what Trump understood is: I can combine the kind of populism and the disgust with the failure and duplicity of government and mix that into a cocktail with the kind of more nativist, xenophobia, Us-versus-Them politics of post-9/11 era.And that's a very powerful wave to surf.And it's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable, but it's going to make enough people feel mobilized that I can become president of the United States of America.

And the effect on the political debate, the effect on America and the process?

I mean, I think that the unity that we all experienced, you know, when a bunch of members of Congress stand on the steps of the Capitol and sing "God Bless America" doesn't exist anymore in this country.There is not an understood national identity anymore that isn't defined in opposition to other Americans.And Donald Trump did not create that dynamic, but he certainly was the last nail in the coffin to the idea that there's some shared national identity, some shared national purpose, even some shared set of national facts upon which we make our decisions.

I don't think Donald Trump was responsible for that.I think he held a mirror up to it and took it to its logical conclusion, all the way into the White House.And I've become incredibly offended when people talk about: "Well, Trump bucked the convention of, he was, you know, against the wars.There's no more post-9/11 president than Donald Trump."It's all the language, all the rhetoric, all the xenophobia, all the nationalism that is impossible without 9/11.It's just repurposed into building a wall.And by the way, he escalated every war he inherited, too.He just talked about ending them, you know.

So I just think that we have to recognize that it's convenient to say that Donald Trump broke America.No, America was broken, and so Donald Trump became president.

The 2020 Election

So as the 2020 election was coming up, he rebranded the threat.He turns the enemy into the socialist left and antifa.… So what are the consequences of that?

I think you have to understand that there's an audience that has been conditioned to be afraid of something every day of their lives.And if you watched Fox or listened to talk radio for the decade after 9/11, you know, it was mostly that you were supposed to be afraid of Muslims.And then, you know, the cast started to broaden.You were supposed to be afraid of the people trying to cross the border, even if they're unaccompanied children.

By the time it gets to Trump, it's like you're supposed to be afraid of Democrats.You're supposed to be afraid of the radical left.Radical Islam became the radical left.It's the same segments on Fox.It's the same language.It's the same Us-versus-Them thing.You can just slot in antifa for Al Qaeda, slot in the radical left for radical Islam.It's triggering the same emotions.But they're being triggered against your fellow Americans and against, like, truth itself, against any concept of objective reality.Like, there's no antifa that's doing anything like what's described on television, but there's no even hint of needing to be accountable to that truth.

And so what he's done is he's just taken that xenophobia and nationalism and prejudice, frankly, that informed the post-9/11 fear, and he's turned it against half the country.He set half the country against the rest of the country in the same way that Bush marshaled the whole country to kind of take on this generational fight against terrorism, this war against terrorism.Trump marshaled his half of the country to think of itself as literally in an existential war against the other half of the country.

And, you know, unless you just, you know—unless you take a peek under the hood of what is happening and the information system that 40% of this country lives in, that makes no sense.But when you do, it makes total sense.

That brings us to the Big Lie.So he motivates his base with the idea that the election was fraudulent, that it was taken away from him.On Jan. 6, his supporters—that he's been in the past sort of vocal about saying "Stand by"—react, and they attack the same Capitol building that the Al Qaeda had tried to attack on 9/11.

I think the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol was the logical endpoint of the 9/11 era, that you have on 9/11 an effort to attack the United States Capitol that fails because of the heroism of Americans on the plane who, by the way, probably didn't care whether the other Americans on the plane were Republicans or Democrats, probably didn't care whether they were saving the lives of Republicans or Democrats; they did what they felt they had to do as Americans, and they saved the U.S. Capitol.In some ways, that's kind of the high point of a sense of national purpose, not the members of Congress singing a song, but the people on Flight 93.

What do you get after that?You get the unleashing of this idea that America's entire national purpose is fighting a war.A war against who?A war against Al Qaeda.A war against terror.A war against terrorists of global reach.A war in Iraq.A war against an axis of evil.Just—just a war.And the emotion that generates, and the massive momentum that generates, and at the same time, pretty quickly, it becomes clear that a lot of it is just dishonest, like the biggest part of the war is a lie.It's an invasion of a country on a premise that is a lie.It's not just wrong; it's a lie that people told, I think, knowing that they were lying, and at least knowing that they were stretching the truth beyond any healthy boundary.

And what you have then is a period of time in which there's a steady erosion in confidence in the government that didn't tell the truth to people and that made these mistakes; in the media that too often not only regurgitated what the government was saying but embraced this narrative of fear—you need to be afraid, that this war is necessary, and then the repurposing of that fear to other political ends.And the ends became increasingly about other Americans that you should be afraid of, or immigrants you should be afraid of.

And suddenly the emotion of and the fears generated by that post-9/11 movement become turned inward, and the enemy is shifting over time to a segment of Americans.And people can call me a partisan, but it's not happening on the left; it's happening on the American far right, which becomes increasingly the American right itself.

The enemy is within.The enemy is the radical left.The enemy is the immigrants.The enemy is the Black president.The enemy is socialism.The enemy is antifa.And there's an entire political media apparatus that just builds to convince people to be afraid of other people and to convince people to not trust institutions and not trust authority, that kind of riding of the tiger.Well, if you ride the back of the tiger, you lose control.

And so the same people that were willing to believe the weapons of mass destruction were there, they were willing to believe that maybe Barack Obama wanted to impose Shariah law on the United States, well, is it any wonder that they'll believe just about anything, you know?

And so what you have is clinically, in terrorism terms—I looked at terrorist plots and radicalization.The same things that radicalize a young Muslim man from Saudi Arabia will radicalize a young white person from anywhere in America, right, which is this idea that my way of life is being endangered by some foreign force, and that there's some conspiracy that is governing the world that is designed to take away my way of life, to take away my identity, my very identity.

Those people who stormed the Capitol, whether they believed that Trump won the election or not, what they did believe is that their identity's under threat because they've been told for 20 years that their identity's under threat, and they've been told for 20 years that someone is coming to take something away from you.And so they behave like radicalized people.They cross boundaries.

And the fact that the United States government that has spent trillions of dollars preventing a single Al Qaeda member from even walking near the Capitol did nothing to protect the U.S. Capitol.People got killed there that day; a lot more could have been killed.In an overt effort, the point of the effort was to overthrow the United States government.

The fact that that didn't register bigger than it did—I mean, it's obviously a big event, but compared to 9/11, it's not even in the same stratosphere as the way the country responded to 9/11—just shows you that, you know, we've become broken.And we're not going to become fixed by just acting like that didn't happen, you know, and we're not going to be fixed by pulling out of Afghanistan.We've got work to do at home.

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